


Oddly Satisfying

by rhodrymavelyne



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:02:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27514273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodrymavelyne/pseuds/rhodrymavelyne
Summary: Dr. Frederick Chilton dreams of a reckoning against everyone who rejected him, set him up, tortured him…he can dream, but perhaps the true reckoning lies in writing Blood and Chocolate since Will, Hannibal, and Francis Dolarhyde are gone…
Relationships: Bedelia Du Maurier/Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Frederick Chilton/Bedelia Du Maurier, Dr. Frederick Chilton/Francis Dolarhyde, Dr. Frederick Chilton/Freddie Lounds, Dr. Frederick Chilton/Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Frederick Chilton/Will Graham, Francis Dolarhyde/Hannibal Lecter, Francis Dolarhyde/Will Graham, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Kudos: 5





	Oddly Satisfying

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place not long after the series has ended. I don’t own Hannibal but for months it has owned me.

The blazer and waistcoat were loose and ill-fitting, hanging loose over Frederick’s chest. Both once belonged to Hannibal. Of course Frederick’s torso didn’t quite fill out their width. Frederick refused to care. He threw his shoulders back and approached Will Graham in his cage.

He often dreamed of having Will back in a cage where the coy little empath would be unable to walk away or look away. Will could no longer escape into his own thoughts. Hannibal had invaded his mind too thoroughly for that. He was stuck, trapped with the labyrinth of the asylum with Frederick. 

Let Will Graham look upon what he’d wrought with his mischief, a mischief he’d imbued from his master. Yes, Will Graham had been quite the apt little pupil. Hannibal must be so proud. Will could see the results of his pride in the ruin of Frederick’s face. Strips of skin were still missing from it. He’d lost his old cane, just whom had collected it? Had it gotten lost in a pile of evidence? Or had Hannibal taken it himself as a trophy? In Frederick’s bleaker moments, he wondered if Hannibal would even bother taking a trophy from him yet why wouldn’t he? Dr. Frederick Chilton had inherited the title of Chesapeake Ripper if only briefly. Hannibal had inflicted him with his identity after all the fuss about giving it to Abel Gideon. There was something to be said for Frederick’s bond with Hannibal, what the two psychiatrists had shared even if on a superficial level. Not that Hannibal would ever acknowledge it. He refused to show any gratitude for the interest Frederick took in him along with the notoriety that interest generated. Hannibal refused to acknowledge him even as a nemesis, the cheek. Cheek, heh, Hannibal did have quite the round cheeks, plump as a schoolboy’s. One could hardly blame Mason Verger for wanting to take a bite. Oh, yes, Frederick could read between the lies expressed in court, at least some of them. He’d told enough himself to recognize them. 

Well, it didn’t matter if Hannibal or Jack Crawford had claimed the cane. Frederick had found himself a fine new one with the head of a skull, grinning in silver. The skull held clamped in its teeth the leather leash which led back to a nearly naked man save for his leather thong, spiked dog collar, and the gag stopping his mouth. It was a still a more flattering outfit than the Tooth Fairy had given him in captivity. Frederick had allowed his assailant to keep his tongue if not his clothes. The rest of Francis Dolarhyde was all lurid dead flesh scarred and marked by the blows which killed him. 

“Sit.” Frederick snapped his fingers at his prisoner and slave as if he was a dog. If anything would arouse Will Graham’s pity, it was this. Will cared far more for dogs than he ever had for people. Francis was now Frederick’s dog. Whether anyone got to strike or pet him was up to Frederick. 

Francis stopped shuffling, posed in a crouch. He turned his head, fierce green eyes moving in the direction of Will. 

Will backed away at Francis Dolarhyde’s intense, predatory gaze, his own green eyes gleaming with something that wasn’t exactly fear. No it was closer to pity. 

“Now I know this is a dream.” Will bowed his head, refusing to let anyone look at his face too closely, the shadows of the cell concealing him. “The Great Red Dragon is dead. Francis Dolarhyde is dead.” 

“Someone had to care for this poor man after you and Hannibal killed and abandoned him.” Frederick jerked at the leash, drawing Dolarhyde’s head back. “Considering how he once cared for me, I thought I’d return the favor.” 

Francis shuffled, doing a half-dance, shaking his head with a savage fury. 

“Oh, frisky!” Frederick tugged again, delighting in the power of the leash and the collar. No wonder Francis had taken such satisfaction from his own bonds, the sanitary napkin gag. “Kill someone and they’re your zombie for life. I thought that was a myth.”

“And I thought Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham killed the Tooth Fairy.” Freddie Lounds sidled up to Frederick with her ever-present recorder in hand and perhaps her most outrageous hat yet. The top of it looked like something Hannibal would serve at his dinner table. “Why does Francis Dolarhyde serve you?”

“And why don’t you humour him and call him the Great Red Dragon?” Bedelia Du Maurier sidled up to Frederick’s other side to stroke Francis’s head as if he were a pet. After all you had to be a dog to excite Will Graham’s pity. “It soothes the poor creature.”

Francis rolled his eyes and turned his head to look at Will pleadingly. 

“This poor creature was desperate for a master since his devil rejected him.” Frederick puffed up, revelling in all the attention. Yes, this was how it should be. Admirers on his arm and his tormentor on a leash. Victorious. “I was there even when the devil and his bride wasn’t.”

Freddie Lounds cocked her head with interest, hanging on every word. No doubt she’d twist them into her own truth but right now she was listening. 

Bedelia Du Maurier bowed her head, perhaps feeling guilty at being an absent bride herself, unable to offer Francis Dolarhyde’s poor damaged psyche any comfort, or perhaps feeling guilty because she felt no guilt. It didn’t matter. She was here at Frederick’s side, not Hannibal’s. 

Frederick grinned a rictus of a grin until he saw Will’s face, the shadowed eyes, the grimace. Distaste, Will Graham found all of this distasteful. It was somehow beneath him.

“What?” Frederick shoved off the two women and came closer to the cage. “Why do you look at me like that? You think I can’t be every bit the devil Hannibal is?”

“Why do you want to be the devil?” There was no mockery in Will’s voice, just exhaustion. He was tired of all this. Frederick sensed Will’s exhaustion in this moment as if he were empathic himself. “For that matter, why do you want to be Hannibal?”

“You need to ask me that?” Frederick threw his head back and let out a sharp bark of laughter. The laughter rang through the hall of what had once been his institution and would be again. 

Francis cringed on the floor, whimpering at the sound. How delightful. 

Ms. Lounds took a step back, giving him a wary gaze as if wondering just how dangerous he was, if the madness in this place were contagious. It was a good question. 

Dr. Du Maurier took a step back, too, eyes widening as she saw and recognized something she’d never seen before. Ah, that was too delicious. 

Nothing was more delicious, however, than how Will Graham looked at him, how Frederick saw himself reflected for one moment in Will’s eyes as so many killers had been reflected. 

No wonder Hannibal had gotten addicted to this man. One might sacrifice more than a few useless lives, create ostentatious tableuxes of murder just to see that look again.

“That man has everything.” Frederick uttered this poisonous truth, sucking at his teeth, feeling as if they were being in their admission. “Power, authority, style, pre-eminence in the field of our mutual endeavors. Above all, he had the best company.” 

He raised his free hand to sweep in a gesture including the cringing Dolarhyde, the wary Dr. Du Maurier, and the silent Will before bringing his hand down as if it were the final cue to an orchestration in the last beats of a symphony. If Frederick listened, he’d hear that symphony, tapping out its relentless keys. 

He had to say the final words, bring the movement to a close. 

“Everything Hannibal ever wanted, he got.” Yes, it was coming to a close. Frederick stepped in time with it, moving right next to his prisoner. He fixed his former patient with a glittering eye. “Even you, Will. Especially you.”

Will Graham didn’t protest or argue. How could he? It was the truth. 

Oh, there was so much more to snarl, but Frederick was waking up to his mutilated mouth, his aching body in stasis, healing from burns no one could survive. He feared the empty howl building up in his throat. The pain in his gut different from that in his face or his mouth. 

He could only talk clearly in dreams. Would he ever be whole again? Or would he have to construct a memory palace, a savage garden within his mind to rival Hannibal’s? 

For he feared he’d lost his motivations to continue. Frederick Chilton may have lost the Dragon, lost Hannibal Lecter, and lost Will Graham along with whatever reckoning Frederick might have upon them. Whatever scheme Will was concocting would explode in his pretty face, leaving him perhaps as ruined as Frederick was. Only there might not be anything left of Will Graham, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, or the Great Red Dragon to gloat over. 

They were gone and Frederick was left behind. Left to tell the tale of their deeds, his re-telling of events. Ah, yes, there he could have his reckoning within the pages of Blood and Chocolate. 

Freddie Lounds might try to obfuscate matters with her own truth, seeing as she fancied herself Will Graham’s biographer. She was far more likely to become Will Graham’s pimp than anything else. Her articles about Will Graham were generating a level of unhealthy interest in young women who fantasized about vampires and were now fantasizing about Will’s relationship with Hannibal. As if anyone could take Ms. Lounds’s truth seriously. 

No, Frederick owned Hannibal Lecter, owned the rights to him and how he would appear postumously in the public’s eyes. This was where he’d take his revenge upon Hannibal, upon the printed page…or e-book’s page…giving everyone a taste of the Hannibal Lecter he, Frederick had come to know. The Hannibal no one could survive unscathed, if they survived at all, not Abigail Hobbs and certainly not Will Graham. 

If Freddie Lounds wished to protest his use of Will Graham or Abigail Hobbs, why, Frederick would see her in court. It was hardly Ms. Lounds first time appearing there. It wasn’t Frederick’s either, but he was a psychiatrist, a martyr of both the Chesapeake Ripper and the Great Red Dragon, not to mention Will Graham himself. He had the right to tell his truth and he would. 

Let the better author win. 

Frederick smiled a ghastly smile at the nurse walking by in the hall and got a perverse shiver of joy when she shuddered. 

There was something oddly satisfying about striking fear. It might even be addictive.

**Author's Note:**

> Dr. Frederick Chilton is taking a bit of a darker turn in this, but I see it as entirely possible considering his state of mind in the last scenes with Will, Jack, and Alana in And the Name of the Beast Is 666 and Wrath of the Lamb. Yes, he’s no longer quite the rubber man, bouncing back from all that’s happened, but perhaps he’s finally stretching too thin…


End file.
